Rapper's New Anti-Trump Album Gets Shredded by Critics
Regardless of how you feel about President Donald Trump, it’s impossible to deny that he has a significant number of staunch supporters and ardent detractors.
Considering the polarizing political landscape in America right now, the injection of politics into entertainment in 2018 is getting worse — for the entertainers as well as the public.
Look at the NFL, for instance. The troubled football league is facing some of its worst issues in regards to its image, and a big part of that stems from players opting to politically weaponize the national anthem with protests.
It’s supposed to be entertainment, not a political debate show.
But it’s not just sports that seems to have this problem.
The very same issue has apparently seeped into music these days.
Rapper Eminem, real name Marshall Mathers, has been one of the most vocally anti-Trump musicians. His profanity-laced video attacking Trump at the 2017 BET Hip-Hop Awards went viral for virtually all of the wrong reasons.
Despite being a ripe 45, Eminem shows no signs of maturing or trying to keep politics out of his brand of entertainment.
Case in point: Eminem released a surprise album on Friday titled “Kamikaze.” It was not well received.
“(‘Kamikaze’) is the album of a confused middle-aged Marshall Mathers whose style and ethos are at least a decade past their expiration date,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote in its review, which deemed the effort an “epic fail.”
“Eminem has always been his own worst enemy,” Forbes wrote in its review, which called one of the tracks “completely unlistenable.”
(The album, Forbes wrote for good measure, is a “fitting end to a summer of undewhelming releases by rap’s biggest stars.”)
Both reviews note that Eminem seems to have lost his way since becoming a rap megastar in the early 2000s.
So if the actual quality of the rap album, which is admittedly a subjective judgment, is so poor, the least Eminem could do is try not to alienate millions of people by injecting politics into “Kamikaze.”
He fails on that front, too.
In the very first track of the album, titled “The Ringer,” Eminem attacks both Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
“I empathize with the people this evil serpent sold the dream to that he’s deserted,” Eminem says of Trump. He also goes on to mention Pence’s private parts.
Eminem’s latest album seems destined for bad things. The proof is in the pudding — the reviews for “Kamikaze” have been uniformly disappointing, at least from Eminem’s point of view.
In fairness, between the actual quality of the music and the injection of politics, it shouldn’t be that big a surprise that “Kamikaze” has been unable to find any foothold on the musical landscape.
To give Eminem some shred of credit, at least the title “Kamikaze” seems fitting.
It’s pretty much what he’s doing with his career.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article included as evidence of the poor quality of “Kamikaze” the fact that it had not yet broken into the Billboard Top 200 by Sunday morning. Soon after publication, we realized that the album had not been released long enough for it to have earned such a distinction, so we removed that reference. We apologize for the error.
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